Charlotte Despard was one of the Victorian era’s great eccentrics. A vegetarian, a Marxist, a Theosophist and a pacifist, she worked all her life towards three main aims: to change the law to improve the lot of London’s slum-dwellers, to achieve female suffrage in Britain and Ireland and to see Irish independence.
Charlotte was born on an estate in Kent, England, into a wealthy Norman-Irish dynasty. Her father, Captain William French, was an irascible naval officer; her mother, Margaret Eccles, a mentally unstable Scottish heiress. Charlotte had four sisters and a baby brother, John (later to become the lord lieutenant of Ireland). She suffered the sort of Victorian middle-class childhood in which she was expected to bring herself up. When she was ten years old, her father died; when she was fifteen her mother was committed to a lunatic asylum; when she was twenty-one, Charlotte found herself orphaned and wealthy.
The Frenches were a wayward, independent-minded family, and Charlotte was the most strong-willed of them. From her very early years she had a determined, free-spirited nature, and she hated authority of any kind. At twenty-six she met and quickly married a man from an identical background, Maximillian Despard, and lived with him in India and London. Charlotte and Max were an odd couple: where he was calm, she was passionate; where he was cautious, she was spontaneous; where he was calculating, she was reckless. Despite their differences, it was a happy marriage, although Charlotte deeply regretted that they did not have any children.
In 1890, after twenty years as a wife, Charlotte became a widow. She grieved for several months and then threw herself into the cosmetic and largely useless charitable works expected of all rich widows, such as sending flowers to the poor and visiting the sick. From these beginnings, within a year of Max’s death, she began a process that would transform her from a well-meaning pillar of genteel society into a radical force for reform.
Charlotte, who could afford to live anywhere she chose, chose to live in Wandsworth, one of the roughest parts of south London. She had conceived a desire to be among the poor and, as she watched the sickly, stunted children wandering the streets in winter, she felt a need to help them directly. She opened her own home to provide basic medical help for the children of the area, then a basic play area for them, which eventually developed into the Despard Club. A couple of years later she moved to an even rougher part of London, Nine Elms, and started a second Despard Club among the poverty-stricken London-Irish.
Through this hard work, Charlotte started to get interested in the English workhouse system. The Poor Laws Act (1834) regarded poverty as a moral failing and gave no relief to the able-bodied poor, except that which could be ‘earned’ by labouring in workhouses. These were institutions where everyone was thrown in together – if you wanted help, you had to live there, usually in atrocious and degrading conditions. When, in 1894, Charlotte was elected a workhouse supervisor in Vauxhall, south London, it launched her public life – and heralded nine years of much-needed reform in south London’s worst institutions.
Through the horrors she witnessed in the workhouse and the slums, it was natural for the empathetic Charlotte to make the political journey towards red-blooded socialism, and through that towards female suffrage. Around 1901 she joined the International Labour Party (ILP), and in 1906 she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a militant suffrage organisation founded by the Pankhurst family. In 1907, Charlotte was jailed for the first time, for leading a noisy WSPU demonstration to Westminster.
The sixty-three-year-old Charlotte was only just getting started. She left the WSPU, citing despotic management as the cause, and became president of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), which had a broader, more democratic and less militaristic outlook. Her style as president was much criticised – she was chaotic, overly blunt, democratic to the point of anarchy and unpredictable, but she continued to be much-loved as leader for many years.
While all this had been going on in London, Charlotte’s adored brother, John, had been going from strength to strength in his own career. He became, in quick succession, a cavalry officer, an author, a well-respected veteran of the Boer War, a field marshall in World War I, a viscount and, in 1918, lord lieutenant of Ireland. John clearly thought his sister was slightly mad, but Charlotte was proud of John’s achievements in his own field and the two kept in touch until their passionately opposing views on Irish independence finally estranged them.
The first time Charlotte had actually seen Ireland had been on her honeymoon, but she was, as her close friend Maud Gonne said, ‘intensely Irish in feeling’. After she became politically active, Charlotte had bought a house in Dublin and had travelled often to Ireland, speaking at suffrage meetings, supporting the workers in the 1913 Dublin Lock-Out, canvassing support for Sinn Féin at election time, and founding an organisation known as the Irish Workers’ College, in her own home, to promote education for workers. However, as a courtesy to her brother and his political career, she stopped going to Ireland when he became lord lieutenant.
Then, in October 1920, Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork was allowed to starve to death in a British prison after seventy-four days on hunger strike. The horror and anger among the Irish community in Britain was intense, and Charlotte’s passions once again flared. She realised she could not stay away from Ireland any longer. In London, her stature was now considerable and her stand for pacifism and civil rights had started to pay dividends. When she spoke, people listened. In Ireland this could help the people in their fight against colonial rule, while her pronouncements would have the incalculable extra benefit of coming from the lord lieutenant’s sister.
In 1921 Charlotte and Maud Gonne travelled through Cork and Kerry collecting evidence of war crimes committed by Crown forces during the War of Independence. Using her high-class connections, Charlotte shamelessly gained access to all areas under martial law: each time they encountered a roadblock, she simply mentioned her brother and was waved through. The two ageing revolutionaries came back armed with information that was damning to the British government. The killing of boys and old men, the razing of homes, the curfew – all were totally unacceptable to Charlotte Despard, even if the laws that made them possible had been passed by her own brother.
At the age of seventy-seven she took up permanent residence in Ireland. She threw herself into her work for prisoners’ rights and for the White Cross, a fund set up with Irish-American money to offer relief to victims of the War of Independence. She formed the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League (WPDL) in 1922 with Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and became its first president. She lived with Maud Gonne in Dublin, but was always considered an outsider by rank-and-file republicans – the very people she wanted to help.
By 1926 Charlotte had joined the Connolly Club, a short-lived, Communist organisation, run by James Connolly’s son, Roddy. She was beginning to realise that the underlying problems of a republic were economic. She now considered Communism, which she regarded as ‘the true unity of men and women’, as the only hope for the future. Around her eightieth birthday she underwent a period of depression that stopped her being active, but, unbelievably, on the achievement of one of her life’s great dreams in 1928 – equal suffrage for British women – she rallied and came back into public life at full strength. She was eighty-four.
In 1930, Charlotte travelled to Russia with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington in a group called Friends of Soviet Russia, and on her return lectured extensively on the superiority of the Russian penitentiary system. She was half in love with the Soviet Union and would have liked nothing better than to see Communism thrive in Ireland. This espousal of Communism affected Charlotte’s credibility and most Irish people came to regard her as totally outlandish. A practising Catholic herself, she was also condemned by the clergy.
Undaunted by her unpopularity, Charlotte electioneered for de Valera in 1932, and spoke out against the rising tide of Fascism the following year. Now aged nearly ninety, she gave away her house and most of her possessions in Dublin and moved to Belfast to spread the Communist word. There, white-haired, arthritic and nearly blind, she wrote speeches calling for the workers to unite, rise up and destroy the Northern Ireland government. But the working man did not care to hear Charlotte speechifying and, in any case, they were too bitterly divided along sectarian lines to present a united front. Charlotte had become an irrelevance.
One day, a mob burned down her house and Charlotte moved out of the city into a small, coastal town called Whitehead, where she knew no one. Shortly afterwards, after decades of unstinting generosity towards her many causes and individuals, she was declared bankrupt.
She was now suffering from the isolation that too often afflicts the elderly, and her brain was no longer sharp. Horrified, she watched as Fascism took hold in Europe and war was declared. Two months after the beginning of World War II, Charlotte was hospitalised after a fall down a flight of stairs. She died in her sleep three days later. She is buried in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin.